Montaigne, Renaissance Blogger

'I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.' -Michel de Montaigne

It's a little ironic, being a blogger, and one of the few people I know who actually enjoys writing essays, and has spent the past 4 years whipping up several of them (though not at many as maybe an English or History Major), that I should not have once come across the work of Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne was a French nobleman of the 16th century, and was best known as the father of what we now call the personal essay. His most memorable work is a collection of prose writings called Essais (French for "trial" or "attempt"), covering diverse topics ranging from sleep, to books, to the limits of human knowledge and our own mortality. Granted, I was not officially a student of literature or philosophy, so there was really no pressing need that could have led me to him, besides errant curiosity or procrastination. But my studies of Renaissance theatre brought me tantalizingly close to him; it's very likely that Shakespeare himself read Montaigne. You'd think the name would have come up at least a couple of times, and sooner. Nope. Rather, I am finally exposed to his writing long after school has ended. But I should be grateful that I've come across him at all.

I got a little three-dollar Dover Thrift edition of a selection of Montaigne's Essays from Russel Books a while back, and read it this past month. I found it invigorating. He (and his translator English poet Charles Cotton) have a knack for making you want to study and meditate on your own life, to flesh out your thoughts and to attain perspective through the act of writing. He made it his goal to paint an honest portrait of human life, using himself as a reference point. His style is skeptical, anecdotal, often going into tangets and never making any claim of possessing some absolute truth. In fact, one of his Essays is titled "That It Is Folly to Measure Truth and Error by Our Own Capacity", discussing just that; we can never get the entire picture.

Reading these essays I found the syntax to be long and meandering. The sentences were in appearance so tangled, so clogged with dependent clauses and sub-clauses--of course not uncommon to writers of his age--it could hardly be decoded by a 21st century reader like myself without breaking into a bit of a sweat, and maybe a slight headache. But I kinda liked it for that. It was a robust workout. I remember what our Prof. Jen Wise said in Theories of Acting, that when you diligently read something beyond your skill level, your mind strengthens and widens to accomodate the new territory. You become a better reader. I think that's something I've found rewarding from generally all archaic writings, including Shakespeare: for a cretin like myself, half the fun is in figuring out just what the hell they're saying. And once you've breached that wall, you can freely roam the country they've laid out for you. You can understand and relate to Montaigne's observations. You can relate to almost everything he's saying, and you feel a kinship with him, and those that have gone before him (he borrows heavily from older, classical writers like Seneca, Plutarch, Horace, Cicero, Aristotle, etc.) This is in no small part because of his very personal style of writing. You then become aware of a long unbroken chain of human experience from the days of ancient Rome, to the French Renaissance, to today. It is a reminder of all the richness that Western philosophy has to offer, something I've neglected of late. Time and distance are no barriers; Montaigne's words are still valuable to me, a young Canadian man in the 21st century. There is still wisdom to be found with him, because like myself, he was a very human being.

So I feel that in a way the blogging world owes a great debt to this French nobleman. My part of it certainly does. I and many others try to understand our lives through writing. And any one who attempts this owes Montaigne for making room for such an attempt. He was an innovator, bringing his own personal experience into his work, because the great subject of his work was himself. So that's why I'm dedicating this post to Michel de Montaigne, the Renaissance Blogger.